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I'm not a linguistics expert, but I've been wondering about this lately. Is it human nature for certain words to be considered obscene?

Many of the words considered obscene in my parent's or grandparent's days no longer carry quite as much weight, while many words that were completely acceptable in their times are now considered offensive (e.g. colored or negro). So it seems that as our culture becomes less offended by certain things, we find others to replace them.

Iirc, Modern Hebrew has no Hebrew words that are offensive (seeing as it's a language that's reconstructed by deeply religious people). All of its swearwords are of Arabic, English, etc., origin.

Not exactly. The people reconstructing the language weren't religious--religious people at the time were against that, and saw it as "profaning the holy language". However, the people who kept using Hebrew in literary contexts after it was no longer natively-spoken were generally religious people using the language in religious contexts, which meant that there wasn't need for vulgarity.

So the possible vulgarity in ancient Hebrew wasn't preserved, partially due to religion. As you said, vulgar terms are generally loanwords from English, Yiddish, or Arabic. However, that's not always the case. There's a racial slur for Africans, "kushi", which is derived from the biblical term for Ethiopian. That wasn't considered offensive until fairly recently though. There are native-Hebrew vulgarities that are recent though, such as "lehizdayen"--to fuck oneself, and "lezayen", to fuck. There are also words that have two meanings, such as the native "lidfok"--it means "to push, knock, bang, etc", but colloquially means "to screw".

However, Hebrew-speaking culture does have a somewhat different conception of vulgar language. You can exclaim things like "kus imekha", a calque from Arabic (though the words are already almost identical) which means "your mother's pussy!" on primetime TV. In my experience, vulgarities relating to sex are considered improper to say around children, but they aren't taboo the way similar terms are in English.

Indeed, though I'd argue zona is closer to "whore"--prostitute sounds a little too official and formal. I don't think "prostitute" is vulgar, but somewhat taboo because of the sexual subject matter. But you can insult people by calling them a zona, which makes it closer to "whore". But those are certainly native-Hebrew terms that are vulgar.

That's interesting that their culture needed to outsource their profanity. Somehow it was necessary enough for them that they found some other language to use.

But, with my little experience with linguistics, I would say that borrowing the words from another language almost includes those words into the modern Hebrew language. Many English words have their origins from other languages (German, French, Latin, Greek) and they are completely accepted as proper English today. As far as I know, that's how language evolves.

As a complete layman I have a theory about part of the necessity of swear words. Mythbusters did an experiment about weather or not swearing decreases pain when you hold your hand in a fishbowl of ice water. Turns out, swearing can decrease the amount of pain you think you feel. Of course, Mythbusters isn't rigorous enough to be considered for scientific publication and I'm just making a stab in the dark, but since pain is something that we come across a lot of times in our life we may unconsciously desire swear words to limit that pain.

Sadly, I'm not able to give one without a lot of research. I learned this studying for the Master of Divinity (dropped it for a Master of Arts in theology). Simply, my professor told us so, and cited an example, which I think was in Isaiah. If I recall correctly, the context was that a foreign nation would come in a blank the women. Words for "rape," "abduct," and others are found in the Scriptures... my professor intimated, "We're pretty sure this is the f-bomb."

Not really: lot of scriptures in the Hebrew Scriptures (~Christian Old Testament) derive from Persian tales. Other religions share those same tales as part of their sacred texts, so it would be relatively easy to guess the meaning of those words provided those religions had diferent morals.

EDIT AND FACT FOR DOWNVOTERS: As an example, tales about Krishna are the same as those told in the scriptures of the Old Testament. Please get your facts right before using the blue arrow. I was a Catholic myself for 16 years and have read the Bible. I'd recommend you read the updated edition of Mentiras fundamentales de la Iglesia Católica by Pepe Rodríguez, who is a recognised authority on the topic and provide uncountable references to check yourself and form your own opinion, but I'm not sure it's been translated to English (it should be translated at least to French, Italian and Portuguese). Anyway, haters are going to hate, debate is not for them.

Regardless of the source of the Scriptures, I'm saying that the Masoretes, who gave pointing to the Hebrew alphabet to retain the Scriptures' legibility as the language died out, censored certain words. I add some clarification in a comment in this thread.

What has been "lost to history" is usually found in comparing the language of other regional peoples, like the Babylonians and even Egyptians, but as a student of the language and exegesis, there remain words for which we simply don't have their true meaning. (And I'd personally argue that's a greater number than is generally accepted, but that's a personal beef.)

Steven Pinker dubbed this the "euphemism treadmill". Basically, as we hear the terms more often and get used to hearing them, they lose their punch. So we come up with a new term (or resurrect an old one) that is new, and shocking, and replaces the one that no longer has that emphasis we want. And then, eventually, we get so used to that one that it loses it's effect...

The words themselves aren't offensive, we give them that connotation. And we seem to need that in our language, because we keep making new ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert either, but I would guess that you'd have a difficult time finding a language that doesn't have some words that are considered vulgar.

Makes sense, but doesn't euphemism treadmill refer to the opposite shift? Not that old vulgarities would lose their punch, but "proper" words start seeming vulgar or even offensive, if used often enough?

Yeah, I think they work both ways. But I think the euphemism treadmill seems to be much faster than the dysphemism treadmill. I guess it's because euphemisms are much more common than dysphemisms. Also, we are much more aware when we offend people than when we don't offend them enough.

I always imagined the euphemism treadmill encapsulating both. Positive words start on the top of the treadmill and go towards the end (i.e. deteriorate) while the negative words are the bit of the belt that's underneath and are travelling towards the front of the treadmill by losing their punch.

Eh, it's probably better to think of it as two separate processes, as imagining it to be a single treadmill might lead one to think that a sufficiently stigmatized term may loop back around to becoming euphemistic/proper, which doesn't really happen automatically (when it does occur, it usually does so only as a concerted effort on the part of a community with which the stigmatized term is associated - c.f. "queer" and "person of color" which are both undergoing this forced-euphemization as we speak).

As a (very irreligious) Jew myself, I feel bad about not bringing this up in my comment, thus leaving it for someone else to collect on all the "ooh, that's fascinating!" karma... but, hey, fair is fair. Kudos.

In my experience, people generally use hashem--the name. Adoshem is really a portmanteau of hashem (the name) and adonai (lord). It's really only used in contexts where you want to be unambiguous about which divine name your using (perhaps you're quoting the bible), but don't want to say adonai.

It isn't universal, no. In the UK at least, bathrooms are rooms with baths in them. Typically, they will have a toilet as well, but if you say "I'm going to the bathroom", people won't think you mean you're going to the toilet unless they think you're trying to sound American.

Ojibwe doesn't seem to have any; it's possibly to speak derisively, and some words, while not dirty per se, are considered a little icky that you wouldn't say them casually in just every circumstance (the word for "shit" isn't a swear word, but that doesn't mean people want to hear it at dinner) but they're not treated anything like English swears either. This seems to be a common pattern for Native American languages. I hear some Central Asian languages are like this too -- they borrow swear words from Russian because they don't have any traditional, local ones.

As someone who also works with Ojibwe, you're certainly right that historically words which we would translate to "ass" or "crap" were not offensive or vulgar, many of them even appearing in sacred stories. (Many of them are considered offensive nowadays to certain speakers; anecdotes abound of Algonquian language learners whose ashamed old grandmothers never told them "the real version" of some story!)

But there are certainly linguistic actions you could perform in Ojibwe that would be considered extremely vulgar and offensive - like telling those aforementioned stories outside of wintertime - as well as evidence that certain words shifted under pressure from taboos, like in Potawatomi, where the word for "deer" shifted at some point historically to a word meaning "It [animate] is scared."

And in my experience it can be very tricky to talk to certain Ojibwes and Odawas about owls - for reasons we shouldn't talk about until the lakes freeze over! :-)

I hesitate to go into too much detail out of respect for the people I work with; many of these things are documented by Bloomfield and subsequent researchers. Suffice it to say here that there are creatures that live in the depths which we dare not speak of lest we rouse their attention, but in the lean, cold months they stay dormant.

Which specific languages are you referring to with regards to Central Asian languages? I'm looking at Kazakh swear words now and they seem Turkic (i.e. I'm a native Turkish speaker, don't know a word of Kazakh per se, and can understand them without the English translation).

Upvote for you! I've had several speakers of Cree tell me the same thing - "we don't have swearwords" or "we don't have dirty words", and to me it comes from a very different cultural viewpoint. Any swear words we have in Michif come from French, so there's some more evidence.

Well, to me this sort of seems like more of a sociological question, though the field does relate quite a lot to linguistics anyway.

I'd say it depends on how you define the borders of the speech community. I believe there are certainly social contexts where a group will not find any single word offensive. I certainly don't think that there's a word that I've felt offended by hearing in every instance.

This makes me wonder if some cultures do not have a concept of obscenity. I'm sure there are those that at least conceive of it in a different way.

It's interesting to note that the scale of obscenity doesn't often translate very well. I'm sure you can recall cases where people use foreign swears as though they somehow "didn't count".

Yeah, this overlaps with sociology quite a bit, but I figured that the sociologists of reddit that are knowledgeable on language are probably in this subreddit as well.

That's a good point about foreign swears not carrying as much weight. I guess it just doesn't have the same meaning for people less familiar with the word. Although, I guess if find the Spanish "puta" much more offensive than "whore." But maybe that's because of the treadmill effect that Corellia40 mentioned.

cases where people use foreign swears as though they somehow "didn't count"

Whenever there's a small child around, I say to my friends, "young'uns about, curse in German." I pick german because most of us know German curse words, even if they only picked them up from the german speakers. I can also curse in Faroese, which is my preferred language, but most of my friends know when I'm cursing at them by now 8P

If you broaden it a bit to include "taboo words", then I think you have something near-universal. There are mother-in-law languages, taboo against naming the dead and of course taboo words in the form of profanity, racial slurs, etc. I do think it's more about culture though --- the language is just the means by which these taboos are expressed/enforced.

Exactly. Unless the obscene nature of the word is part of its definition the language doesn't say anything about the obscenity of a word.

However, that's approaching the subject from a prescriptive point of view, in which the specific word was coined with the obscene nature of the word being part of its given definition. From a descriptive point of view the usage factors heavily on the meaning of the word and can remove an obscene aspect from the definition.

Some cultures don't swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:00 AM, rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means "at the restaurant."

From my limited understanding, Japanese does not have swear words in the same way most westerners would understand it. They have stuff like kuso (shit/excrement) or chikushou (beast, which comes from "beast womb" or a woman that has twins or triplets) that gets translated as "shit" or "fuck" in amateur manga/anime translations, but the connotation isn't as obscene as it would be in the US. I'm guessing it wouldn't be polite in formal situations or school, but it seems pretty ok for adolescents to say. On the other hand, what's really rude is using the wrong level of politeness with someone. Politeness is HUGE in Japanese society, so showing contempt to someone is a big no-no.

I'm not a native Japanese speaker, nor do I have any formal training in this language, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

You're pretty much right. Kuso and chikushou are simply exclamatory. They don't actually mean excrement or intercourse. I didn't study long enough to be able to tell you anything about the connotations, unfortunately.

Well, I know for certain that Japanese does have curse/obscene words. They have lists of them that are prohibited from being used on television due to their offensive nature.

One example, which I'm ashamed to say is the only one that comes to mind immediately, is the word katawa (片輪), which I remember caused a stir with Japanese people on 2chan when they learned of the game Katawa Shoujo (a visual novel made by Westerners). While the intended meaning by the developers was "Disability girls," the more accurate connotation would be "Cripple girls," and is considered offensive to native Japanese. It's one of the banned words from broadcast that I mentioned beforehand.

I'm not familiar with katawa, but I guess it comes back to the question of what we're considering a curse word. For example, you'll never hear a newscaster say gaijin, but is "foreigner" any more of a curse word than the word for "foreign country person"? Gaijin has a negative connotation (sort of, it's changing and dependent on usage, but that's not really germane to the discussion at hand), but the word itself isn't what I'd consider a curse in the same way fuck is.

I don't think you can conflate foreign words and their connotations with translations. Curse words are cultural, not inherent, which is why my immigrant parents didn't initially find 'fuck' and 'shit' offensive, unlike their own language's swear words. Now, it's obvious if an American started using specific words rudely at my mother, such as calling her an 'immigrant' or 'foreigner,' she'd be able to tell they're being rude to her, but that doesn't mean she'd get offended at the words, she'd be offended by the intended meaning behind them.

So I don't believe gaijin, which is a legitimate casual term for foreigners, could be compared to swear words. However, katawa, which could be compared to the English word 'retard,' is very much a swear word, as culturally it has been decided so by the Japanese, in as much as any decision is made with a language.

Hm, I was thinking about what I'd consider a swear, and to me that it would be useful to separate swears from insults. On one hand, you have things that are used as exclamations, like fuck, shit, damn, etc. These seem to have a more universal usage, as in you can say fuck if you hurt yourself, or if something doesn't go right.

On the other hand, you have derogatory language for things, like retard, cripple, fag. These are more situationally specific, as in you wouldn't call someone with a broken leg a retard, but you'd apply it to someone with a mental disability, or to someone of normal intelligence who's done something stupid.

Somewhere in between seem to be derogatory terms which use curses, like asshole. In my mind, asshole and dick describe the same type of behavior, but I'd put asshole as a curse word whereas dick would not be.

Japanese seems to have mostly what falls into the latter two categories, but not a whole lot in the first. Kuso is the only exclamatory swear I can think of, whereas what you've described katawa as wouldn't fit that description.

I don't know if that's the general way people would break cursing into categories, but it seems useful to me to define cursing and vulgarities as opposed to insults and derogatory language.

Gaijin (外人) is actually pretty offensive when used in certain contexts. The neutral term for a foreigner is gaikokujin (外国人) which translates to "foreign country person". Gaijin literally means "outsider".

I'd say the literal translation for gaijin could be either outsider or foreigner, as 外 is either outside or other place. And you're right that it's offensive in certain contexts, but seems to me like it's changing. I didn't hear anyone use it in a derogatory context outside the right-wing black noise trucks driving around in Tokyo telling us to go home.

Yeah, those groups that want foreigners out of the country. I didn't actually hear much of what they were saying because their sound systems suck and my listening comprehension isn't fantastic, but I knew about the groups beforehand. They probably didn't actually say gaijin. Don't they usually complain about the 2nd gen Koreans anyway?

Actually, I'm not sure I've ever heard gaijin in a negative context, which is mainly why I think the term is becoming more innocuous.

I don't know specifically about swear words, though I'm sure that Malay and Polynesian languages do have them. But in any case they do have a wide array of taboo language. In fact the word 'taboo' itself comes from a Polynesian language.

Well, from the little Finnish I know, I do remember 'perkele', which means something to the effect of 'dammit' or 'fuck'. However, I don't recall my Finnish teacher ever mentioning 'ravintolassa' even though she was quite fond of teaching us swear words --- especially if they were silly when translated. And they most certainly have vulgar language.

That's what makes me think it would be so difficult to have a language without obscenity. Because there will always be topics that are not meant to be openly discussed.

But I think there is still an interesting question of what separates the words "intercourse," "sex," and "fucking." There are contexts in which none of these words would be acceptable, and there are contexts in which certain ones would draw considerably more attention than others.

There are cultures in which the range of taboo topics is very different from what we're used to. For instance, the name of the chieftain or of certain totem animals might be taboo to say out loud (kind of like taking god's name in vain in the Christian tradition), so you had to come up with euphemisms for them or use a word borrowed from another language.

I've always found Quebecois profanity unique in that sense. It has the sex and bathroom related language as remnants from the European French, but the profanities that are considered the strongest and are used most often are just names of religious items (tabarnak = tabernacle, calice = chalice etc.) So not even blasphemy or invoking God's name in vain or anything like that - just simply names of items with non-specific bad connotations. Even the word "to swear" means "to consecrate".

It really throws you off too. Profanities in a foreign language usually lack the same connotation they would do for a native speaker (I can say and hear 'fuck' or 'cunt' much more freely and comfortably than I can do the same for the Turkish equivalent), but at least I can understand the effects since equivalent words do exist in Turkish. That's not true for the Quebecois profanities, and I can not, for the life of me, understand the true connotation of shouting "tabarnak" at someone.

"My host of the holy sacrament of the chalice of Christ" is totally going to be my new exclamation.

I had never heard of Quebecois profanity. That's very interesting. So would a native speaker of another French dialect understand the connotation of such profanity or is it completely constricted to Quebec?

Is that a mutual thing or is it simply that the Quebecois know about continental French? So would a continental Frenchperson, or a Francophone person from ex French colonies would know of, say, "tabarnak", like you know about "putain"?

The media flow is definitely stronger from them to us, but while I wouldn't want to make a blanket statement about ALL French people, I think a majority would understand "tabernak"... most likely less so among rural or older folk (as with anything, I suppose).

They're used throughout French Canada, though there are some regional variations in pronunciation. For example, "ostie" (host) [ɔs.t͡si] is largely pronounced [ɛs.t͡si] in eastern Ontario and the Outaouais, and tends to vary in New Brunswick. The word "diable" (devil) [d͡ziɑːb(l)] informally becomes [jɑːb] in some areas and distinctly becomes something akin to [d͡ʒɑːb] in Chiac/Acadian (mostly New Brunswick).

There are also a few fairly regional words, like calvaire and ciboire aren't common at all in my parts, and some slight differences in expressions, especially in Chiac/Acadian. But overall, all swears are generally comprehensible to speakers of other dialects in Canada, and intonation gives everything away. However, francophones outside Canada express some difficulty understanding since many are simply not accustomed to hearing our accent at all (though the French do get a kick out of learning the differences, and I'm sure they do pick up when someone is swearing).

The same issue about diffusion could be said of true Acadian compared to other French Canadian varieties, since, even though its swears aren't wholly different, the dialectal changes in pronunciation and lack of getting accustomed to hearing it hinder comprehension.

No French person would use such profanity, but they would understand it just from exposure to Qc culture. I guess like how I would never tell someone to "sod off" (I'm American) but obviously I understand what it means.

They also do not translate very well. While the meaning is carried, the sound of words will change the intensity. I once had a discussion about this phenomenon, when I once had to translate "If I want your shit, I wipe my cock." to German, so the insulted one would know what is going on. To my surprise, while it was only somewhat profane in English, it was full of sibilants in German, sounding like a series of hisses, more like a threat than a simple sound of disapproval.

This gets at a general point: There are taboo topics with un-taboo words (food taboos are often like this), and there are taboo words for things that aren't taboo (words for topics in race and religion and religion are often like this). Analytically, we must not confound the two.

However, you are asking about vulgar and obscene words. Intercourse is never vulgar or obscene, sex is maybe a little vulgar depending on your audience (e.g. children), and fucking is always vulgar. So while the topic might be off limits, the words themselves aren't.

I think what seems to be most interesting about all this are that many languages consider the same KINDS of words profane (religious, scatalogic, anatomic, etc). The way that taboo utterances seem to skirt around the same issues, year after year.

Also, with all this talk about translating words, keep in mind the appeal of taboo utterances is semantic AND phonologic. They "sound" bad, the way FUCK does, but SUCK doesn't as much, and YUCK does in a different way.

Italian and Spanish have "cuolo/culo", which frankly sounds positively lilting to me, an English speaker, but obviously doesn't (or doesn't in the same way) to an Italian or Spanish-speaker. The same goes for coño or any number of Romance vulgars.

I'm told (by my ESL students) that in Chinese they have the word cào "that an old man says when he drops something on his foot", but it sounds almost exactly like the Italian word for hello, goodbye, and lots more (ciao).

I really think beauty lies in the ear of the beholder in this case. While all languages have words that can be called offensive, there are dialects to certain languages that exist i am places where, culturally, people are rather unoffended by the meaning of words (not counting the actual intentions or actions behind those words). For example, in some caribbean spanish dialects they do have words that are considered offensive in other places, but they are accepted as little more than emphasizing words are people are not offended simply by hearing them. Make sense?

A good wife refrained from speaking the name of her husband. At most, she would refer to him as the father of one of their children. And there was a very strict taboo against uttering the name of a dead person. [Source]

Pirahã. They lack numerals, fiction, and talk of the distant past and future as well. Arguably, they have the only language without recursion as well.

Edit: All of you Generativists who are downvoting me are doing so without criticizing my position for reasons that you and I both already know: you have no real argument. Those of you who know enough about it can't face your cognitive dissonance by rehashing that old explanation that completely changes the definition of recursion aloud. That's why you're throwing rocks and running away.

I just didn't think that claiming the Pirahã don't swear when there's so much still unconfirmed about their language and culture and without even providing a citation is remotely convincing.

And the rest of the comment (along with the subsequent edit) shows that all you want to is start yet another argument with generativists over the Pirahã controversy, which I can kind of sympathise with, but don't hijack this thread to do it.

I had no intention whatsoever of starting that debate for the reason I mentioned above. No hard-line Generativist will dare because it's not logically consistent and they know it.

The Pirahã almost categorically refuse to adopt anything into their language that doesn't serve a utilitarian purpose, ergo if any language is without profanity, that would be it. No report in the dozen or so I've read about it has ever indicated that obscene words in Pirahã exist, so I see no reason to believe they do since it is such an important topic in language exploration that it is highly unlikely that they would've just failed to mention it.

Nevertheless, I'm going to e-mail Dan Everett to see if he can shine some light on this.

lojban is constructed, so not really relevant; but here it is: it has one predicate that carries the derogative meaning ("mabla", with an often-heard compound formant "mal"). Everything outside that one word is defined as non-derogatory.

.i tu se mabla: "you are %$#"

.i ti malglico: "this is %$# anglocentric"

.i fy. gletu: "F. fucks" (neutral, no judgment)

.i fy. mabla gletu: "F. %$# has sex"]

EDIT: consequently (and in contrast to most natural languages), the first sentence in this exchange is the strange one if said in lojban, while the second one would be perfectly normal:

"pinche negro pendejo". I'm a native speaker of Spanish and I can confirm that not only are simple words like "estupido" (stupid) and "idiota" (idiot) are actually seen as more offensive words than their counterparts in English.

Spanish definitely has plenty of profanity, and how profane it is is interpreted by various different Spanish speaking cultures. Spaniards will refer to the bottom of a soda pop bottle as kulo (ass) and nobody in Spain blinks, while Mexicans consider the word kulo to be rather profane and mostly don't use the word in front of children.